Thought for a Sunday

E.W. Bullinger provides an interesting commentary of the letters of apostle Paul in his The Church Epistles - Romans to Thessalonians and offers some fascinating insights.

In the beginning of the book, he discusses the organization and structure of the epistles and explains how the seven books can be grouped into two sets of three and four. Romans, Ephesians and Thessalonians making the set of three, and then Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, and Colossians making the set of four. At first I was going to attempt to provide my own interpretation but I quickly came to see that it would be more expedient simply to use his words. He goes on to explain that Romans stands first, containing the A, B, Cs of Christian education...

Until its great lesson is learnt we know nothing. If we are wrong here, we must be wrong altogether. The Spirit has placed it first because it lies at the threshold of church-teaching.

...

The doctrinal portion, consisting of the first eight chapters, shows what God has done with "sins" and with "sin," and how the saved sinner has died with Christ, and is risen with Christ = made a son and heir of God in Him.

This is where Ephesians starts from! It begins not with man, but with God. It approaches its great subject, not from man's necessities, but from God's purposes. It is occupied not so much with what the saved sinner is made in Christ, but with what Chris is made to be unto him. It is God's point of view rather than man's.

In Romans we have the Gospel: in Ephesians the Mystery.

In Romans the saved sinner is shown as dead and risen whit Christ: in Ephesians as seated in the heavenlies in Christ; while in Thessalonians he is seen for ever in glory with Christ.

Romans takes up the sinner in his lowest depths of degradation: and Thessalonians leaves him on "the thrown of glory for ever with the Lord": while, midway between, Ephesians views us now by faith as already seated with Him there. Our feet have been taken out of the mire and clay (Romans 1); they are now set upon the rock (Eph. 1) and presently we shall be upon the throne 1 Thess. 4).

...

Viewed together, they form the A, B Cs of the Christian faith, as distinct from all else in the whole Bible - nothing like it is found elsewhere. All the rest is written for us, for our learning. But this is all about us. The course of instruction is complete, and it is perfect. It commences at the lowest point and leaves us at the highest.

Looking at the second set of four books we find that they are in pairs - Corinthians and Galatians follows Romans because they exhibit departure from its special teaching. The second pair - Philippians and Colossians follow Ephesians because they exhibit departure from its special teaching.

So that we have the whole course of church teaching; the complete curriculum of Christian education, set before us as a whole, positively and negatively.

In the three (Rom., Eph., and Thess.), we have "doctrine" and "instruction". In the four (Cor., Gal., Phil., and Col.) we have "reproof" and "correction". Here is seen how "profitable" these Epistles are for the perfection (i.e., the complete education) of "the man of God", fitting him out for every duty and every emergency.

But there is a further correspondence between these four Epistles.

The first of each pair, (Cor. and Phi.) exhibits practical departure, while the second of each pair (Gal. and Col.) exhibits doctrinal departure. That is to say, in Corinthians we have practical failure as to the teaching of Romans, while in Philippians we have a failure to exhibit in practical life the teaching of Ephesians as to the unity of the members of Christ's Body.

On the other hand, in Galatians we have doctrinal failure as to the teaching of Romans. This is why Gal. and Rom. are so much alike, as everyone knows; though, all that most can see in this likeness is that they were "written about the same time"! The real difference is that what is stated as "doctrine" in Romans is repeated as "correction" in Galatians.

So in Colossians we have doctrinal failure as to the teaching of Ephesian truth. In Ephesians, Christ is revealed and set forth as "the head of the Body". In Col. we have the doctrinal evils which come from "not holding the Head" (Col. 2:19)

Given this, we have an outline "structure" as follows:

A ROMANS. "Doctrine and Instruction." The Gospel of God: never hidden, but "promised afore". God's justification of Jew and Gentile individually - dead and risen with Christ (1-8). Their relation dispensationally (9-11). The subjective foundation of the mystery.

B CORINTHIANS. "Reproof". Practical failure to exhibit the teaching of Romans through not seeing their standing as having died and risen with Christ. "Leaven" in practice (1 Cor. 5:6)

C GALATIANS. "Correction." Doctrinal failure as to the teaching of Romans. Beginning with the truth of the new nature ("spirit"), they were "soon removed" (1:6), and sought to be made perfect in the old nature ("flesh") (3:3). "Leaven" in doctrine (5:9).

A EPHESIANS. "Doctrine and Instruction." The Mystery of God, always hidden, never before revealed. Jew and Gentiles collectively made "one new man" in Christ. Seated in the heavenlies with Christ.

B PHILIPPIANS. "Reproof." Practical failure to exhibit the teaching of Ephesians in manifesting "the mind of Christ" as members of the one Body.

C COLOSSIANS. "Correction." Doctrinal failure as to the teaching of Ephesians. Wrong doctrines which come from "not holding the Head" (2:9), and not seeing their completeness and perfection in Christ (2:8-10).

A THESSALONIANS. "Doctrine and Instruction." Not only "dead and risen with Christ" (as in Romans), not only seated in the heavenlies with Christ (as in Ephesians); but "caught up to meet the Lord in the air, so to be for ever with the Lord". In Rom., justified in Christ; in Eph., sanctified in Christ; in Thess., glorified with Christ. No "reproof". No "correction". All praise and thanksgiving. A typical Church.

The rest of the book provides a commentary on the seven Epistles and expands considerably on the structure and content above.

What a fascinating individual Bullinger must have been to have been able to glean such insights from his study. I am continually amazed as I read his work. I haven't finished The Church Epistles - Romans to Thessalonians yet but I already know that, like some of his other work, I'll read it again a second or third time. This is definitely a must-read volume that anyone who is serious about the Bible will want to have in their library. I suspect the folks at Hearts and Minds Books would be happy to get a copy to you.

Totally Uninspiring

Dinesh D'Souza talks about his recent debate with atheist Christopher Hitchens at his web site. Among other interesting morsels he offers this:

One of the most interesting questions in the debate was posed to Hitchens by a man from Tonga. Before the Christians came to Tonga, he said, the place was a mess. Even cannibalism was widespread. The Christians stopped this practice and brought to Tonga the notion that each person has a soul and God loves everyone equally. The man from Tonga asked Hitchens, "So what do you have to offer us?" Hitchens was taken aback, and responded with a learned disquisition on cannibalism in various cultures. But he clearly missed the intellectual and moral force of the man's question. The man was asking why the Tongans, who had gained so much from Christianity, should reject it in favor of atheism.

In my response, I noted that when the missionaries came to India, they sometimes converted people by force. Even so, many Indians rushed on their own to embrace the faith of the foreigners. And why? Because they were born into the low caste of the Hindus. As long as they remained Hindus, there was no escape; even their descendants were condemned to the lowest rungs of humanity. By fleeing into the arms of the missionaries, the low-caste Hindus found themselves welcomed as Christian brothers. They discovered the ideal of equal dignity in the eyes of God.

If we look at the history of Western civilization, we find that Christianity has illuminated the greatest achievements of the culture. Read the new atheist books and make a list of the institutions and values that Hitchens and Dawkins and the others cherish the most. They value the idea of the individual, and the right to dissent, and science as an autonomous enterprise, and representative democracy, and human rights, and equal rights for women and racial minorities, and the movement to end slavery, and compassion as a social virtue. But when you examine history you find that all of these values came into the world because of Christianity. If Christianity did not exist, these values would not exist in the form they do now. So there is indeed something great about Christianity, and the honest atheist should be willing to admit this.

By contrast, does it make any sense to say, as Hitchens does in his book's subtitle, that "religion poisons everything"? Religion didn't poison Dante or Milton or Donne or Michelangelo or Raphael or Titian or Bach! Religon didn't poison those unnamed architectural geniuses who built the great Gothic cathedrals. Religion didn't poison the American founders who were for the most part not Deist but Christian. Religion didn't poison the anti-slavery campaigns of William Lloyd Garrison or William Wilberforce, or the civil rights activism of the Reverend Martin Luther King. The real question to ask is, what does atheism offer humanity? In Tonga, as in America, the answer appears to be: Nothing.

Indeed. Atheism offers nothing to society except perhaps "gangsta" rap and art that consists of crucifixes immersed in urine. Atheism has inspired no charities, no hospitals, no feats of moral greatness, no great art or music. It inspires nothing because it is essentially nihilistic. It denies the existence of meaning, purpose, and hope in the world. It tells us that human beings are nothing but cattle, that we have no dignity or worth, that morality is an illusion. All of this leads to ugliness and despair. It's certainly not very inspiring.

On the other hand, it does inspire one question: Why, given the bleakness and sterility of the atheistic worldview, does anyone embrace it? I suspect that at least part of the answer for at least some atheists is that the denial of God enables one to reject certain moral constraints placed upon our sexuality. A recurrent theme in the biographies and writings of atheists from Bertrand Russell to Michael Onfray is the sexual liberation they desire and which atheism facilitates.

Like a man in the grip of homosexual lust who is willing to risk contracting HIV if only he can gratify his need in some anonymous bathhouse encounter, some are willing to embrace a meaningless, hopeless existence as long as they can have sexual pleasure. It's the same sort of bargain Dr. Faustus made with Mephistophilis and which proved his undoing. It's a bargain that has been destroying lives ever since the dawn of civilization.

RLC

Re: Boys Adrift

We've received a lot of feedback on the post Boys Adrift, most of it from young women, interestingly, but some from young men. Most of the people who responded to that post said they knew people who fit exactly the description of the guy who experiences "Failure to Launch." Some of the responders asked what the author suggests parents can do about it. I urge anyone interested in the problem to read Sax's prognosis and prescriptions. It's one of the most important books published in the last couple of decades, in my opinion, and anyone who is a parent, teacher, or who works in any capacity with young men or hopes to someday be one of these should definitely spend time with it.

It's titled Boys Adrift by Leonard Sax and it can be ordered by phone or e-mail at Hearts and Minds Bookstore. It'd make a great Christmas gift.

RLC

Brotherhood

Michael Yon took this photo in Baghdad of Muslims helping Christians replace a cross atop St. John's Church. It's a nice story which you can read here. The second paragraph is especially encouraging.

RLC

Choosing Free Will

This interesting article, passed along by a student, suggests that moral behavior is a function of the brain and that if we alter the brain we will disrupt the normal moral decision-making process.

This is no doubt true, but we shouldn't think that this proves determinism to be true. It doesn't follow that because some choices for some people are not free that therefore no choices for anyone are free.

A healthy brain may well work with the mind to produce choices that are not necessitated by prior states of affairs. In other words, in a normally functioning mind/brain system we have the freedom needed to be held morally responsible for our decisions. The future is not predetermined by the past nor by our present brain states. There is right now more than one possible path into the future that we can choose.

The determinist disagrees with this, but he has a difficult time explaining why. After all, he has to admit that ultimately his disagreement is the inevitable product of all the influences that have acted upon him throughout his life, and he has no way of knowing whether the "truth" of determinism is one of those influences or not.

RLC

Globalization Is Good For You

From time to time we hear laments in the media about the flow of jobs out of the country and the deteriorating economic position of the American middle class. Much of the blame is placed on globalization (when they get done blaming Bush), but this article by Daniel Griswold in the New York Post argues that the conventional complaints about globalization are little more than myths. Griswold points out, for instance, that:

Like so many assumptions about trade, the belief that more global competition has somehow lowered the living standards of the average American worker and family is just a myth. The critics have it all wrong: The middle class isn't disappearing - it's moving up.

The Census reports that the share of U.S. households earning $35,000 to $75,000 a year (in '06 dollars) - roughly, the middle class - has indeed shrunk slightly over the last decade, from 34 percent to 33 percent. But so, too, has the share earning less than $35,000 - from 40 percent to 37 percent.

It's the share of households earning more than $75,000 that's jumped - from 26 percent to 30 percent.

Trade has helped America transform itself into a middle-class service economy. Yes, the country's lost a net 3.3 million manufacturing jobs in the past decade - but it's added a net 11.6 million jobs in service and other sectors where average wages are higher than in manufacturing. Most of these new jobs are in better-paying categories, like professional and business services, finance and education and health services.

Critics of trade repeat as a mantra that real wages have been stagnant since the 1970s. But the data on real wages exclude benefits - which have been rising as a share of worker compensation. Those data also rely on a cost-of-living index that has systematically overstated inflation and thus understated real income gains.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average real hourly compensation earned by Americans has actually grown by 22 percent during the past decade - even as trade and other measures of globalization have grown rapidly.

There's more in the article to shine a ray of optimism into the gloominess you might be feeling today as the Dow continues its dispiriting free-fall.

RLC

On Scientific Theories

The conventional wisdom has long been that intelligent design is a religious, not a scientific, hypothesis and when Judge Jones' oracular ruling in the Dover trial reinforced the conventional view everyone nodded their heads in unthinking agreement. Dave Scott over at Uncommon Descent argues persuasively that this is simply wrong. He explains succinctly why it is that ID bears the chief qualification of any theory that aspires to be scientific - it's falsifiable.

Scott writes:

Karl Popper famously stated that a hypothesis is scientific if it can be falsified. He used swans as an example. He stated a hypothesis:

All swans are white.

Popper said that it can never be proven that all swans are white because there is always the possibility that a black swan exists somewhere but has not yet been observed. He stated that the hypothesis is still scientific because it can be falsified - the observation of a single black swan will falsify it.

The biological ID hypothesis can be stated as:

All complex biological systems are generated by intelligent agents.

We already know, or may reasonably presume, that complex biological systems can be generated by intelligent agents. There's a whole discipline called "Genetic Engineering" devoted to it. What we don't know is whether any non-intelligent means can generate complex biological systems. A single observation of a complex biological system generated by a non-intelligent cause will falsify the biological ID hypothesis.

[The bacterium] P.falciparum replicating billions of trillions of times in the past few decades represents the largest search to date for a "black swan". This is orders of magnitude more replications than took place in the evolution of reptiles to mammals wherein there are many exceedingly complex biological systems that separate them. If P.falciparum had been seen generating any complex biological systems such as those that distinguish mammals from reptiles then it would have falsified the ID hypothesis. None were observed. This doesn't prove ID but it certainly lends strong support to it. All perfectly scientific.

It might be argued, however, by those who deny the claim that ID is science that had P. falciparum produced complex systems that it would have at best only falsified certain versions of ID. Many ID theorists believe that design was front-loaded into the cosmos so that the Designer produced a semi-deterministic process that would gradually unfold the varieties of living things we see today. Someone who holds this view, if confronted by empirical evidence of complex systems produced during the trillions of falciparum replications, could technically claim that the bacterium is simply playing out the program that had been downloaded into the universe (or into life) at its origin.

Thus, the critic might argue, ID is not falsifiable even if it appears that natural processes are producing the complex systems that ID alleges natural processes cannot produce. Therefore, ID is not a truly scientific theory.

Even so, whatever the technical refuges available to the IDer might be, discovering an actively evolving complex system in P.falciparum would deal a devastating psychological blow to intelligent design and would make it very difficult for anyone advocating it to get traction in the intellectual community. For this reason I agree with Scott that ID is in principle psychologically falsifiable if not technically so.

Moreover, it is at least as falsifiable as is the Darwinian claim that natural forces and processes are responsible for the great diversity of life we see in the world around us. What set of observations could be reasonably expected to prove that claim false?

Thus if that claim is considered to be within the domain of science there's no justification, other than metaphysical prejudice, for excluding the claim that natural processes are inadequate to account for specified complexity in the biosphere.

RLC

National Security Experts

Michael Ramirez comments on how Congress might handle a terrorist nuclear threat:

RLC

The Day the Music Died

Mark Steyn, who seems to know everything about music, commemorates the twentieth anniversary of Alan Bloom's classic work the Closing of the American Mind with a paen to Bloom's chapter on the music culture in the U.S.

If you liked Bloom's book - I won't believe you if you tell me you've never read it - and/or you're a student of music and/or music history, you'll be delighted by Steyn's essay which he opens with this:

We are all rockers now. National Review publishes its own chart of the Fifty Greatest Conservative Rock Songs, notwithstanding that most of the honorees are horrified to find themselves on such a hit parade. The National Review countdown of the All-Time Hot 100 Conservative Gangsta Rap Tracks can't be far away. Even right-wingers want to get with the beat and no-one wants to look like the wallflower who can't get a chick to dance with him. To argue against rock and roll is now as quaintly irrelevant as arguing for the divine right of kings. It was twen- ty years ago today, sang the Beatles forty years ago today, that Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. Well, it was twenty years ago today-1987-that Professor Bloom taught us the band had nothing to say.

Read the rest. It's very good.

RLC

The Fence Works

One of the claims made by open borders advocates on both sides of the border is that a fence would not keep people from illegally crossing from Mexico into the United States. I always wondered how they knew that and why, if they did know it, they would so strongly oppose the fence since, according to them, it wouldn't stop illegals from pouring across our frontier anyway.

Their assertion always seemed at best counterintuitive and at worst disingenuous. Now we can add to it's list of shortcomings the fact that it appears to be empirically false. Just ask the people on both sides of the border who live near the section of fence that has been erected.

If you watch the video at the link note the statement of the third guy interviewed: People should be free to go where they want. I wonder if he keeps the doors of his home open to anyone who wants to wander in and out.

RLC

Defining Torture Down

The matter of torture has raised its ugly visage once again last week, this time in the hearings for President Bush's nomination for the post of Attorney General, Michael Mukasey. Mukasey was asked whether waterboarding was torture, in response to which he wiggled and waggled and never answered the question, an evasion which cast momentary doubt upon his confirmation.

What Mukasey should have said is that the question the Senators asked really can't be properly answered until Congress has legislatively established a meaningful definition of torture. Everyone is "against torture" in the abstract, of course, but few can say with any precision what torture is and under what circumstances, if any, it should ever be permitted.

The United Nations Convention on Torture, which is frequently cited as authoritative and to which we are a signatory, is so vaguely worded as to be not much help. Article 1 says:

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind...

The difficulty is the phrase "severe pain or suffering." What constitutes "severe"? What metric do we use to assess mental pain to determine whether it is severe? What is severe for one person may be easily tolerated by another.

Another problematic construction is the phrase "intimidating or coercing." Anyone who is a prisoner and held under armed guard is going to be ipso facto intimidated and coerced. It would appear that, taken literally, the Conventions rule out holding prisoners.

Article 16 of the document states that in addition to torture all acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture as defined in article 1 are also to be forbidden.

But this is no help either. What is inhuman and/or degrading is highly subjective. It is degrading to be yelled at or to be shackled or even detained by another, for heaven's sake. The U.N. Conventions, if taken seriously, make an interrogator who raises his voice to a prisoner subject to being charged with a war crime. This is ludicrous, of course, which is why no one takes the U.N. Conventions seriously. They define torture so broadly that almost anything the military does with detainees could be construed as falling afoul of the guidelines.

As matters stand torture is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. What is needed is for the Congress of the United States to do what President Bush has urged it to do and conduct a debate on these matters and produce more lucid guidelines as to what will be permitted to our interrogators and what will not.

Until then, questions like the one asked of Mukasey will remain pretty much meaningless.

RLC

A Conversion in Progress

Antony Flew, the world famous atheist philosopher who began having doubts back in the 1980s about the ability of atheism to explain certain facts about the world and who subsequently became a theist (though not a Christian), has written a book describing the thinking that led him to abandon atheism and embrace theism.

The volume is titled There Is a God and in it Flew, the son of devout Christian parents - his father was a Methodist preacher - recounts how he abandoned his parents' faith at about the age of fifteen, largely under the influence of the problem posed by the unfolding Nazi evil in the 1930s, and how he went on to become one of the most prominent philosophical atheists of the twentieth century. He was committed throughout his career to the principle that one should follow the evidence wherever it leads, and he could never see the evidence he was able to observe leading anywhere but to atheism.

This began slowly to change, though, in the 1980s. Throughout his career he had been in contact with some brilliant Christian thinkers - he knew C.S. Lewis - but by the late 80s the number of outstanding Christian philosophers had multiplied and their work was undermining several of Flew's chief philosophical arguments.

Following hard upon this state of affairs were the developments in cosmology which had been accruing for the past decade. Three questions in particular kept popping up and pointing Flew away from his atheistic assumptions: Where did the laws of nature come from? How did the cosmos come to be so finely tuned for life? And how did complex life arise out of nonliving matter?

Gradually, Flew was led by the evidence to the conclusion that there is indeed a divine mind behind the universe. He had no Damascus road experience, no moment of conversion, just a gradual realization that theism is true.

He is not a Christian and still finds the idea of an afterlife difficult to accept, but he's very open to Christian belief and even includes in his book an appendix written by renowned theologian N.T. Wright, with whom he has been in dialogue, in which Wright lays out the case for the resurrection of Jesus, a case that Flew finds impressive. He concludes with this assessment of Wright's argument: "It is absolutely wonderful, absolutely radical, and very powerful."

It will be interesting as the life of this great thinker draws closer to its end if there are not yet one or two further surprises forthcoming.

There Is a God can be ordered at Hearts and Minds bookstore.

RLC

Top 100

The Daily Telegraph of England unveils its list of the 100 most influential conservatives and 100 most influential liberals in America. Like most such lists there's much to quibble with.

For instance, the list of conservatives belies a real failure to understand American conservatism. They have Rudy Giuliani ranked #1, but Giuliani isn't really much of a conservative, and he's certainly not influential. General Petreaus is #2, but I doubt that he has ever publicly stated a political position, and despite his excellent service to our country, he's hardly influential in the realm of conservative ideology. Matt Drudge at #3 deserves to be somewhere on the list, perhaps, as does Newt Gingrich at #4 but certainly neither belongs in the top five. Drudge is best known for his news website, not his political views and although Gingrich is influential his influence is mostly confined to the more cerebral conservatives. The most influential conservative in America actually doesn't appear on the list until #5. You can go to the link to find out who that is.

In my opinion the most influential liberal doesn't show up until #9 on the liberal list. I certainly don't think the number one choice, Bill Clinton, is really all that influential or even all that liberal.

Another reason to not like the list is that Viewpoint doesn't appear anywhere on it. What's up with that?

RLC

1984 in 2007

This will make your jugular bulge. The University of Delaware has been requiring students to attend mandatory reeducation and consciousness raising sessions with the Resident Assistants in their housing units. The group FIRE has the details in this press release from last week:

The University of Delaware subjects students in its residence halls to a shocking program of ideological reeducation that is referred to in the university's own materials as a "treatment" for students' incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The Orwellian program requires the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware's residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is calling for the total dismantling of the program, which is a flagrant violation of students' rights to freedom of conscience and freedom from compelled speech.

"The University of Delaware's residence life education program is a grave intrusion into students' private beliefs," FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. "The university has decided that it is not enough to expose its students to the values it considers important; instead, it must coerce its students into accepting those values as their own. At a public university like Delaware, this is both unconscionable and unconstitutional."

The university's views are forced on students through a comprehensive manipulation of the residence hall environment, from mandatory training sessions to "sustainability" door decorations. Students living in the university's eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a "diversity facilitation training" session at which RAs were taught, among other things, that "[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality."

The university suggests that at one-on-one sessions with students, RAs should ask intrusive personal questions such as "When did you discover your sexual identity?" Students who express discomfort with this type of questioning often meet with disapproval from their RAs, who write reports on these one-on-one sessions and deliver these reports to their superiors. One student identified in a write-up as an RA's "worst" one-on-one session was a young woman who stated that she was tired of having "diversity shoved down her throat."

According to the program's materials, the goal of the residence life education program is for students in the university's residence halls to achieve certain "competencies" that the university has decreed its students must develop in order to achieve the overall educational goal of "citizenship." These competencies include: "Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society," "Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression," and "Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality."

At various points in the program, students are also pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate their agreement with the university's ideology, regardless of their personal beliefs. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations, committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20%, taking action by advocating for an "oppressed" social group, and taking action by advocating for a "sustainable world."

In the Office of Residence Life's internal materials, these programs are described using the harrowing language of ideological reeducation. In documents relating to the assessment of student learning, for example, the residence hall lesson plans are referred to as "treatments."

This Orwellian brain-washing is precisely what totalitarians have done everywhere they've had the power. Now it's being done by the lefties at Delaware. I'll be sure to scratch that school off the list of possible destinations for my college-bound child. I think I'll also send them a DVD of The Lives of Others. It's a movie the apparatchiks at Delaware should find inspiring.

UPDATE: The chairman of the University politburo, Patrick Harker, sensing the PR disaster that this program has turned into, has ordered it be terminated. Good decision, comrade.

RLC

Looking Grim

The situation in Pakistan continues to deteriorate. Pakistan military personnel fighting the Taliban in the northwest (Waziristan) are surrendering or being captured and beheaded in droves. President Pervez Musharraf has declared a state of emergency and suspended the constitution. The Supreme Court has been disbanded. Thousands have been arrested and thousands more are marching in the streets in protest.

Why should we care? We should care because Pakistan has nuclear weapons and the Islamists fighting against the government want them. If they get them we will almost certainly be a target. We should also care because Musharraf has been a fairly steady ally in the war on terror. Should he fall, Pakistan, with its 160 million Muslims, may be lost to us.

Bill Roggio and Breitbart have further details.

The only silver lining here is that Musharraf may be getting desperate enough to take serious measures against the Taliban, and may even invite us to help him. This would go a long toward easing Taliban pressure on Afghanistan.

RLC

See No Evil

As Hugo Chavez moves inexorably closer to becoming a dictator in Venezuela and as thousands of protestors fill the streets to demand that he stop his quest for absolute power, the American left is showing its solidarity with ... Chavez.

It's not just Cindy Sheehan, of course. Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, and Danny Glover have all made the pilgrimmage to Caracas to pay homage to the man who promises to be the next Fidel Castro.

The left has a strange fascination with thugs and killers. They loved Fidel Castro, and they recently oberved the 40th anniversary of Che Guevara's death. Che was a mass killer, who did Castro's dirty work after he overthrew the Batista regime in 1959, executing hundreds of members of the previous government, but the left reveres his memory anyway, just as they loved Stalin and Mao who murdered millions of their countrymen in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of students and others are marching for freedom in Venezuela and are being suppressed by rubber bullets, tear gas, and fire hoses, and the left in the U.S. is largely silent. Chavez wants to impose socialism in Venezuela and civil and political rights are expendable if they stand in the way of socialism.

RLC

Murder, Slavery and Islam

This story about Francis Bok, a Christian refugee from the Sudan, is a snapshot of what life is like for black African Christians living in an Arab Muslim country. It's a column you shouldn't miss. Here are the opening paragraphs:

It was the kind of excitement that made children uneasy. Grownups were pointing toward the river. Others were arriving at a run. The bustling atmosphere in the market place of the peaceful African town of Nyamlell in the Dinka tribal area in the southern Sudan was changing. Worried adults could see what a seven-year-old Dinka boy, Francis Bok, who had gone to the market that fateful day with older village children to sell his mother's eggs and peanuts, could not: "a storm of smoke" rising from a nearby village. Sellers frantically began to gather up their wares and hurry away with the buyers. The adults understood. They recognized the approaching signs of the dreaded scourge that most people believed had disappeared from the pages of African history long ago: a slave raid.

It was 1986 and Bok was about to see his happy world of family and village shattered forever by a centuries-old, barbaric practice that has never died out: the violent capture and enslavement of black Africans by Arabs.

"The Arab militias were told to kill the men and enslave the women and children," said the now 28-year-old Bok, who was himself captured and enslaved that day, to an audience of 80 people at the University of Toronto recently where he had been invited to speak by the campus organization, Zionists at U. of T.

Bok, who would spend the next ten years working as a child slave, then outlined for his college listeners in horrifying detail the savage hurricane of violence he next witnessed when the Arab slavers attacked.

Read the rest of Bok's tale at the link.

RLC

Boys Adrift

In the movie Failure to Launch, Matthew McConaughy plays a 35 year-old man named "Trip" who still lives with his parents who are growing increasingly desperate to have him leave the house. Unfortunately, McConaughy is in no hurry to give up this comfortable arrangement, and so the parents hire the services of a professional "interventionist" (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) to woo him out of the nest.

The movie is humorous, but Leonard Sax, a family physician and research psychologist, takes the main theme seriously. He cites a lot of evidence to support the claim that there is a growing and worrisome epidemic of boys and young men who seem listless, alienated from school, and unmotivated toward doing the things that one must do to achieve success in life. It's not that these boys aren't bright, many of them are. It's not that they're unmotivated, many of them are highly driven but not toward the goals that parents and teachers would prefer.

Sax assumes that boys themselves haven't changed much in the last thirty years but that our culture has. He discusses five changes in particular that have had a profound effect on young males and which he believes to be largely responsible for the lassitude many of them exhibit. Not every boy is affected to the same extent by these five factors nor do the five affect every boy, but, Sax argues, enough boys are harmed by at least one of them to have created a serious problem for many parents and teachers, not to mention the boys themselves. He concludes the book with some advice as to what parents might do to help their sons.

The five factors Sax discusses are these:

Changes at school: Many schools, particularly in the early grades K through 2 or 3, are not well-structured for boys. Consequently, boys fall behind early, become disengaged and often never develop an interest in academic success.

Video games: Sax points out that gaming often takes over a boy's life. He can have success, power, and thrills through video games that his normal activities can't come close to providing. As a result he's often not motivated to do much of anything but compete on-line and on-screen and this he often does for hours everyday.

Medications for ADHD: Alderoll and Ritalin are often over-prescribed and are now believed, according to Sax, to be damaging to a boy's brain.

Endocrine disruptors: This one was the most surprising to me. Some of the chemicals which leach out of the clear plastic bottles which are used to contain so much of the liquid we drink mimic estrogen, a female hormone. Some scientists believe that this is at least in part responsible for the decline in male fertility in much of the developed world. It has also, Sax, suggests had a number of other side effects which are harmful to male development.

Revenge of the forsaken gods: Recent generations of boys are unique in our history in that many boys have grown up without positive male models in their lives to pass on to them what it means to be a man. There are few masculine heroes today and many boys grow up surrounded only by their peers. Such boys tend to become either "slacker dudes" or they seek to emulate Akon, 50 Cent and other thugs.

There's much more to each of these factors than what I've sketched above, and the material Sax lays out for the reader in each of the chapters devoted to them is often fascinating.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter is one titled End Result: Failure to Launch. In this section Sax shares e-mails and other correspondence he has received from parents, girlfriends, and wives of boys and young men who exhibit the characteristics he talks about in the book. The e-mails are riveting in their pathos and the sense of wasted lives that they convey.

If you are a young man, the parent of boys, a teacher of boys, or one who cares about our future then this is a must-read. I'm buying a copy of the book for my daughter and daughter-in-law for Christmas. It may be the best present you can give a parent of a boy you care about.

You can order a copy of Boys Adrift for someone you think should read it at Hearts and Minds bookstore.

RLC

The Conservative Predicament

Jonah Goldberg pens an insightful essay on the subject of why people who are basically conservative nevertheless often tend to vote liberal. Here's an excerpt:

In 1964, two political psychologists, Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril, famously asserted that Americans were ideologically conservative but operationally liberal. Americans loved Barry Goldwater's rhetoric about yeoman individualism, but not if it meant taking away their Social Security checks or farm subsidies. "As long as Goldwater could talk ideology alone, he was high, wide and handsome," they wrote. "But the moment he discussed issues and programs, he was finished."

Still, Goldwater went to Tennessee to blast the Tennessee Valley Authority, God bless him. That was like going to a brothel to denounce prostitution, or to Iowa to denounce ethanol -- but I repeat myself. He carried only six states in the 1964 presidential election.

Liberals have an inherent advantage. As long as they promise incremental, "pragmatic" expansions of the government, voters generally give them a pass. And every new expansion since FDR and the New Deal has created a constituency for continued government largesse.

If Hillary Clinton promised to socialize medicine -- which, let the record show, she has attempted to do in the past -- she would lose. But her current campaign promise to simply expand coverage sounds reasonable enough -- even though there's no reason to think she'll stop pushing for a national single-payer healthcare system (a.k.a. socialized medicine).

"Liberals sell the welfare state one brick at a time, deflecting inquiries about the size and cost of the palace they're building," writes William Voegeli in an illuminating essay, "The Trouble with Limited Government," in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Committed conservatives, meanwhile, find themselves at a disadvantage: They advocate smaller government for everybody -- when Americans generally (including most Republicans) want smaller government for everybody but themselves.

Unless and until we start voting for what's in the best interest of the country as a whole and not for what's in our own best interest, special interest politics will continue to pull us further toward state socialism whether the government is run by conservatives or liberals. Indeed, sometimes it seems as if the only difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans want to stroll toward socialism at a more leisurely pace whereas Democrats want to sprint to it.

RLC

Revisiting a Gold Primer

I've been meaning to post a thought or two on Viewpoint but other concerns have prevented me from doing so. However, I felt today was a special day of sorts so I determined to at least post this brief observation. It was just over three years ago that I posted A Gold Primer and at that time, gold was selling at about $400 per ounce. I suspect when, at the time, our readers saw that, they felt gold was way over-priced and certainly, there must be better investments. I suspect that when our readers see the price of gold today they may continue to believe that the price of gold is too high and...there are better investments. You see, gold just closed the trading session today at $805.00.

I thought it would be interesting to revisit some of those posts to see if they might still be relevant today and I was fascinated with the sense of timelessness I felt while reading A Gold Primer. The main threads of interest were gold, the dollar, and oil. This week oil hit record highs, the dollar hit record lows, and gold is closing in on its record high of $850 from 1980.

As I mentioned in A Gold Primer, the cost of gold hasn't really increased in the last three years, rather the purchasing power of the dollar has been diluted by the flood of "liquidity" from the Federal Reserve. Since the process of inflation tends to accelerate, as it is wont to do, it's becoming much easier to observe. In only three years, the Federal Reserve has caused the loss of a cool 50% of the dollar's purchasing power.

Ignore the representatives at the Fed who claim that inflation is "tame". Inflation is alive and well. Asia and the Middle East oil countries see it first hand. China holds $1 Trillion dollars in US government investments and in only three years they have realized a loss of $500 Billion. They can't feel very good about that. Oil is similar to gold. It's not that the price of oil has gone to record highs, the purchasing power of the dollar has gone to record lows so the oil-producers demand more dollars for a barrel of oil. That should'nt be a surprise.

The individual articles that make up A Gold Primer can easily be found using the Viewpoint Search facility but I have consolidated them into one document and shamelessly placed it in the Viewpoint Hall of Fame section.

Enjoy,

.

Anti-Choice Progressives

Liberals, George Will tells us, have taken to calling themselves progressives because the word liberal has become rightly identified in the public mind with lousy ideas. Changing the name, however, doesn't change the quality of their ideas. For example, consider the upcoming referendum in Utah over a school choice/voucher program. According to Will, the benefits of the program are substantial, but it is being opposed by those who label themselves progressives. Why would liberals, who claim to be all in favor of a person's right to choose, nevertheless oppose it when it comes to our children's education? Will writes:

Passed last February [in Utah], the Parent Choice in Education Act would make a voucher available to any public school child who transfers to a private school, and to current private school children from low-income families. Opponents of school choice reflexively rushed to force a referendum on the new law, which is suspended pending the vote.

The vouchers would vary in value from $500 to $3,000, depending on household income. The teachers unions' usual argument against school choice programs is that they drain money from public education. But ... every Utah voucher increases funds available for public education. Here is how:

Utah spends more than $7,500 per public school pupil ($3,000 more than the average private school tuition). The average voucher will be for less than $2,000. So every voucher that is used -- by parents willing to receive $2,000 rather than $7,500 of government support for the education of their child -- will save Utah taxpayers an average of $5,500. And because the vouchers are paid from general revenues, the departed pupil's $7,500 stays in the public school system.

Furthermore, booming Utah, which has about 540,000 public school pupils and the nation's largest class sizes, expects to have at least 150,000 more than that a decade from now. By empowering parents to choose private alternatives, the voucher program will save Utah taxpayers millions of dollars in school construction expenses.

Opponents of school choice argue that it will produce less racially and socially diverse schools. But because students are assigned to public schools based on where they live, and because residential patterns reflect income, most of Utah's public schools are either mostly wealthy and white or mostly nonwealthy and nonwhite. Utah's Office of Education reports that the state's private schools -- which are operating one-third below full enrollment -- have a higher percentage of nonwhites than do public schools.

Intellectually bankrupt but flush with cash, the teachers unions continue to push their threadbare arguments, undeterred by the fact that Utah's vouchers will increase per-pupil spending and will lower class sizes in public schools. Why the perverse perseverance? There are two large, banal reasons -- fear of competition and desire for the maximum number of dues-paying public school teachers.

What will defenders of that idea -- former liberals, now known as progressives -- call themselves next? Surely not "pro-choice."

I've omitted a few paragraphs for the sake of brevity, but the rest of the essay can be read at the link. When a "progressive" says he or she favors a person's right to choose, the only choice they're referring to, evidently, is the choice to kill one's unborn children.

RLC

Real Heroes

This story offers an excellent look and feel for what our troops have been going through in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last four years and what combat is like there. The courage and strength these men exhibit under unimaginably terrifying conditions is truly breathtaking. It's also a story which for some reason you'll never read in the MSM.

RLC

A Brighter Dark Horse

When Senator Sam Brownback dropped out of the Republican race for the nomination for President it opened the field for the guy we've kept our eye on for the past six months - Mike Huckabee. If Huck can do well in the New Hampshire primary he'll very likely vault into the first tier of candidates, and once he's there, and people get to hear him and learn what he's about, he may be competing for front-runner status by summer.

This Weekly Standard article, especially the second page, explains what makes Huckabee such an attractive candidate for many socially conservative Republicans and even some moderate Democrats. Or you might wish to read this piece by Dick Morris. They're both helpful in understanding who Mike Huckabee is and why, if voters got to know him, he'd be a formidable candidate not only for the nomination of his party but in the November election as well.

Unfortunately for Huck, conservatives are not unanimous in their appreciation of his positions. Dissenting views have been expressed by John Fund and Hugh Hewitt among others who explain that, though they sincerely like Mike Huckabee, he's not the conservative he appears to be, especially when it comes to economic matters.

Even so, he's probably more representative of many contemporary Republicans than anyone else in the race except, perhaps, John McCain who has burnt too many bridges in the party to get the nomination. If you're not sure what it means to be representative of Republican voters you might want to read one or both of the articles linked in the second paragraph.

RLC

Is It Torture?

Is it torture if you can volunteer for it and then talk about it while you're undergoing the treatment? It hardly seems the same as having one's fingernails pulled out. The guy in this video has himself subjected to the controversial interrogation technique called waterboarding, a technique critics call torture, but he certainly seems none the worse for the experience.

Anyway, when a terrorist is subjected to waterboarding in order to extract information that might save the life of one of your children, the terrorist is in complete control of how long it lasts. All he has to do is produce the information and it's over. Opponents of this technique, however, think that terrorists should have the right to withhold information that could save your child's life and should not be subjected to unpleasant experiences to make them give it up.

Here's a question for those who might be disturbed by the video of three men holding down the subject: Imagine the scene in a Civil War field hospital where men had to hold down a wounded soldier so that the surgeon could amputate his leg without anasthesia in order to save his life. What is the moral difference between what the surgeon's assistants did in holding down a screaming soldier in order to save his life and what modern interrogators do in holding down a panicky terrorist in order to save the lives of innocent civilians?

If you go to the post at Democratic Underground the guy talks about his experience of being waterboarded. He seems to be saying that since he couldn't take the treatment for more than a few seconds it must therefore truly be torture. This is a weird argument. If we accept it then we have to say that any technique that gets a terrorist to talk is ipso facto torture and therefore should be considered banned by the Geneva Conventions.

If the terrorist spills his guts after a few minutes of listening to AC/DC that would be torture according to the guy at Democrat Underground, but this is nonsense. Whatever torture is it doesn't consist simply in being unendurable.

RLC

Weak Argument

There are lots of arguments on offer as to why we should not have gone to war in Iraq and why we should not now stay there. Some of these arguments are good, many are not, but one of the worst is an argument that a correspondent on another blog trotted out against my concern that a premature retreat would be a human rights disaster in the Middle East. The same argument recently appeared in a letter to the editor of the local paper written by a woman who used it to disparage anyone who supports the effort to bring peace and stability to the Middle East.

The argument, sometimes called the "chickenhawk argument" goes something like this: Young men and women in the military are placing their lives at terrible risk in Iraq, and many are dying or being grievously wounded. Unless a supporter of the war has placed his/her own life in jeopardy in similar fashion (or has a loved one who has) he or she has no right to urge continuation of a conflict that will result in the deaths or maimings of some of those youngsters.

This line of reasoning is of a piece with the argument that since men can't get pregnant they have no right to tell women that they shouldn't have the right to an abortion.

There are so many problems with this kind of thinking that it's difficult to know where to begin to analyse it.

Let's start with an analogy that will show the flaw in the logic. If we accept the argument above then we must also accept any other argument of the same form. So, for example, unless we are willing ourselves to become police officers we have no right to insist that the police risk their lives to fight crime. Or, if the rigors and travails of missionary work do not appeal to us we have no business supporting and encouraging those who do feel called to risk everything, like those Korean young people in Afghanistan, by doing missionary work.

These arguments, which are of the same form as the original, are absurd, but if so, so is the original argument.

We might also point out that many who serve in the military never face combat themselves. Does this mean that they have no business offering an opinion on the war? Is it only those who have actually been shot at, and their families, who have the right to engage in the public debate on the war? Or, since most who have been shot at have come through the experience unharmed, perhaps we should restrict the qualifications to speak out in support of the war to those who have actually been wounded or to the families of those who have died. In other words, how do we decide exactly where we draw the line separating those who have the right to support the war and those who don't?

Do those who make the argument that no one who hasn't served should speak in favor of the war think that those who pay the nation's bills should have no say in deciding the most important issues that face us as a nation? Every person who pays taxes has an ipso facto right to express his/her opinion on every domestic or foreign issue, whether the issue is abortion or war. The fact that a supporter of the war hasn't served in the military himself no more disqualifies him from voicing his support of our mission in Iraq than the fact that a supporter of the police hasn't ever been a policeman disqualifies him from voicing his support of the mission of our police.

To try to silence supporters of the war because they have never themselves served in the military is a sign that one has no good arguments to counter the arguments cited in favor of what we are trying to do in Iraq. It's also a sign that one is rather desperate to come up with something to discredit those who offer those supportive arguments.

RLC

A Semester in Twenty Minutes

I can think of few more profitable ways to spend twenty minutes than to spend them reading this speech by David Horowitz given last Monday at the University of Wisconsin.

Last week was declared by Horowitz's organization to be Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week on campuses across the country, and he took criticism for that because a lot of people thought that this was a slur and attack against all Muslims. Horowitz clarifies this misunderstanding in the speech and along the way provides some wonderful lessons in world and Middle East history as well as a seminar in current world problems.

Reading the speech carefully is like getting an entire college course in less than half an hour. I urge you to invest the time. It's well worth it.

RLC

Bunker Busters

A little noted item in the Defense Department's budget request leads the NewsMax staff to conclude that another step toward a strike against Iran is now being undertaken. I think that NewsMax might be reading more into this than is warranted, it may just be a precautionary move, but, on the other hand, they may be correct. Here's the gist of the report:

The Defense Department has asked for $88 million to retrofit B-2 Stealth bombers so they can carry a 30,000-pound "bunker buster" bomb called the massive ordnance penetrator (MOP), which has the capacity to destroy deep underground targets. The Administration says the request is in response to an "urgent operational need from theater commanders."

Some observers might conclude that the Pentagon is seeking weaponry to strike Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida in their caves in Afghanistan. But as Gerard Baker, U.S. editor of the Times of London, points out in the New York Post, that would not require Stealth bombers.

"The Americans own the skies over Afghanistan and Iraq and could, if they wished, blanket the two countries with all manner of bombardment from a few thousand feet in broad daylight," Baker notes.

Instead, the more likely targets are the subterranean nuclear enrichment facilities in Iran, according to Baker, who writes:

"The debate in Washington about what to do with the increasingly recalcitrant and self-confident Iranian regime has taken a significant turn in the past few weeks. And the decision to upgrade the bombing capacity of the military is perhaps the most powerful indication yet that the debate is reaching a climax."

The Newsmax report revealed that Northrop Grumman, the Air Force's prime contractor on the B-2, would retrofit the bomber to carry the new 30,000-pound MOP. "The U.S. Air Force's B-2 Stealth bomber would be able to attack and destroy an expanded set of hardened, deeply buried military targets" using the MOP, the company said....

Despite the ominous overtones of this report it doesn't necessarily follow from the retrofit that the administration right now intends to attack Iran. It could be that this is just a precaution in case an attack on Iran becomes necessary sometime in the future. It's possible, in other words, that the retrofit is being done now so that a President Clinton can use B-2s to attack Iran once she takes over. Wouldn't that be ironic?

RLC

From the Front

Embedded reporter Michael Yon sends along an encouraging dispatch from Iraq. It provides a sense of how things are going in the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

RLC

Behe v. Miller

This may not be of much interest to those who don't follow the debate between evolution and intelligent design, but theistic evolutionist Ken Miller of Brown U. has written a couple of reviews of IDer Michael Behe's Edge of Evolution which, Behe thinks, indicate a very slim difference between them. This is interesting because Miller has been a very outspoken critic of intelligent design, and testified against it at the Dover trial a couple of years back.

In fact the difference between Miller and Behe seems to be more theological and methodological than scientific. Miller thinks that if God is an active designer of the world then He would be responsible for the world's suffering and pain. Behe thinks that as scientists they should stick to the empirical facts and leave the theological interpretations of those facts to the theologians and philosophers.

Theistic evolutionists like Miller generally hold that God uses the evolutionary process to bring about the living things He wants to exist, but they don't believe that God's hand is empirically detectable in the process. In other words, they believe by faith that God is hidden behind the evolution of life. Intelligent design advocates, on the other hand, believe that there are some things in the living world which are best explained in terms of intelligent, purposeful engineering and that these constitute empirical evidence of the existence of a Designer. I.e. they believe that God's hand is visible in what has been made.

The difference probably seems very thin to many people, and this is Behe's point. Why, he and others wonder, do people like Miller get so out of sorts over a difference that seems so slight?

For those who follow this fascinating debate Behe's comments (there are three posts) on Miller's second review of his book can be read at the link.

RLC

Wheat for Nukes

DEBKAfile claims that U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies have in their possession documents written in Syrian president Bashir Assad's own hand that detail the arrangement Syria had with North Korea that eventuated in an Israeli airstrike on Syria last month. Here are a couple of excerpts from DEBKAfile's report:

In one, Assad hands down a specific order in his own handwriting that North Korea not be charged for Syrian goods, including an annual shipment of 100,000 tons of Durham wheat for five years worth a total of $120 million. This is the equivalent of the value of the reactor for producing plutonium up to its most radioactive stage, which North Korea promised Syria.

A high-ranking Western intelligence source speaking to DEBKAfile described the evidence against Assad in US and Israeli hands as solid and much closer to a smoking gun than the West has turned up against Iran's nuclear program.

The following sequence of events unfolds from the garnered documents:

Damascus and Pyongyang settled between them that the nuclear transaction would be masked as a joint venture to build a cement factory in northern Syria; meanwhile, North Korea would sell Syria cement for its development projects.

According to DEBKAfile's sources, North Korean freighters, which began putting in at Syria's Latakia and Tartus ports in January 2007, unloaded cargoes of cement in which nuclear reactor components and materials were concealed.

The North Korean traffic at these ports and the Durham wheat transaction attracted the attention of US and Israeli secret services.

The rest of the report can be read at the link.

RLC

Admitting Defeat

Bin Laden has admitted defeat in Iraq according to the analysis at Strategy Page, and it's not looking too good for al Qaeda elsewhere in the Muslim world either. Nor is the picture particularly rosy for former Saddamites and other dead-enders:

Bin Laden doesn't discuss how the Americans defeated him. It was done with data. Years of collecting data on the bad guys paid off. Month by month, the picture of the enemy became clearer. This was literally the case, with some of the intelligence software that created visual representations of what was known of the enemy, and how reliable it was. The picture was clear enough to maneuver key enemy factions into positions that make them easier to run down.

Saddam's henchmen, the main enemy, were no dummies. They were smart enough, and resourceful enough, to build a police state apparatus that kept Saddam in power for over three decades. However, for the last three years, that talent has been applied to keeping the henchmen alive and out of jail. But three years of fighting has reduced the original 100,000 or so core Saddam thugs, to a few thousand diehards.

Three years ago, there were hundreds of thousands of allies and supporters from the Sunni minority (then, about five million people, now, less than half that), who wanted to be back in charge. Now the remaining Sunni Arabs just want to be left in peace. Thus the Sunni nationalists off in the Baghdad suburbs are shooting at, and turning in, their old allies from Saddams Baath party and secret police. This isn't easy for some of these guys, but it's seen as a matter of survival. While the fighting in and around Baghdad is officially about rooting out al Qaeda, and hard core terrorists, it's also about taking down the Baath party bankers and organizers who have been sustaining the bombers with cash, information and encouragement.

It was just a couple of months ago, wasn't it, that Harry Reid and the rest of the Dems were bewailing that the war was lost and the situation was hopeless. It may eventually turn sour, who knows, but right now Reid looks pretty silly.

Read the rest at the link.

RLC

Indoctrinate U.

A documentary on liberal bias and other forms of left-wing nuttery in the academy is soon to be forthcoming from Evan Coyne Maloney who, according to PowerLine, is:

... a skilled filmmaker who has produced lots of conservative-oriented videos. Among other things, he likes to attend far-left demonstrations and interview protesters to find out how much they understand about the issues on which they are demonstrating. The results are often illuminating.

Evan's first full-length movie, I believe, is Indoctrinate U, a documentary about liberal bias in American higher education. No serious observer doubts that such bias exists, but not everyone wants to make a record of it. Evan did, and the resulting product is spectacular....No major distributor wanted to take a chance on Evan's film, so he is going it alone, with an innovative campaign that involves internet users registering their desire to see the movie

You can visit the website and watch the trailer here. You can also sign up to express your wish to have the movie shown in your area.

RLC

Darwinian Consequences

One of the accusations most vehemently denied by Darwinian materialists is that a consistent Darwinian worldview leads logically to eugenics, racism and the holocaust. Try as they might, though, they simply cannot evade the logic of their belief that we are engaged with every other species and race in a struggle for survival. Richard Weikert brilliantly draws the connections between Darwin and the 19th century eugenicists and from these to the holocaust of the 1940s in his book From Darwin to Hitler.

Now it seems that even prominent Darwinians are acknowledging the link. Over at First Things Edward Oakes reminds us of a statement made by the great knight of the Darwinian faith, Richard Dawkins, who, in an interview he gave to an Austrian newspaper in 2005, conceded that:

"No decent person wants to live in a society that works according to Darwinian laws. . . . A Darwinian society would be a fascist state."

Ideas have consequences, and the idea that the human race is engaged in an internecine Darwinian struggle leads ineluctably to the ideas advanced by the race purifiers who advocate eugenics and elimination of unfit elements from the race.

Darwin himself wrote that some races of men were inferior to others:

"The variability or diversity of the mental faculties in men of the same race, not to mention the greater differences between the men of distinct races, is so notorious that not a word need here be said."

"Many races, some of which differ so much from each other, that they have often been ranked by naturalists as distinct species."

He also believed that the extermination of inferior races was inevitable:

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world... The break between men and his nearest allies will then be wider."

Hitler was simply applying Darwinian logic when he sought to purge from the "Master Race" all gypsies, Jews, and the mentally infirm.

The logical oucome of a consistent Darwinian worldview, combined with atheistic materialism, is Auschwitz. Indeed, ideas do have consequences.

RLC

Is Religion the Problem

Dinesh D'Souza debated atheist writer Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great) at King's College the other evening. You can read D'Souza's summary of the proceedings at his blog and you can watch the entire debate here.

The topic of the debate was the question Is Religion the Problem? but in my opinion, that's the wrong topic for a debate between a theist and an atheist. The fundamental question which should be addressed is whether belief in God is reasonable. Contemporary anti-theists like to recite a litany of egregious historical shortcomings and crimes of the various world religions and use that as evidence to justify the conclusion that God does not exist. What often gets overlooked is that there's no logical connection between whatever atrocities of which votaries of some religion may be guilty and the matter of God's existence. The historical record only counts against, or in favor of, the truth of a particular set of religious beliefs about God.

Anyway, watch the video of the debate and decide for yourself who you think won.

RLC

Catholic Judges

Antonin Scalia, in a recent speech at Villanova, made the perhaps surprising claim that there's no such thing as a "Catholic judge." Robert Miller at First Things agrees with him, and so do I. In fact, I would argue that there's no such thing as a Christian judge, or at least there shouldn't be.

It is the judge's duty to interpret the law. There is no Catholic or Christian interpretation of the law any more than there is a Christian interpretation of French. The law says what it says regardless of what we'd like it to say, and it is the judge's obligation to rule on what it says. It is the legislator's job to write the law and certainly one can be a Christian legislator, but their's is a duty toward the law much different than the duty of interpreting it.

Miller quotes Rick Garnett toward the end of his essay who:

agrees with Scalia's main point but thinks that he is still a "Catholic judge" whether he likes it or not. Garnett writes: "To be a Catholic judge . . . is to be a judge in the way a Catholic, like everyone else, should be a judge: To take seriously one's obligation to decide impartially, to submit to the rule of law, rather than one's own preferences, and to have an appropriate humility about the task one is charged to perform. Obviously, this is not a distinctively Catholic way of judging, . . . but it is, I think, the way a Catholic should judge. It's also the way Justice Scalia thinks he should judge and, I'm confident, he thinks this way (at least in part) because he is a Catholic."

As Miller points out, however, "a Catholic judge is not merely a Catholic who is a judge but someone who judges in a way different from other judges precisely because he is Catholic - and this is exactly what Scalia denies he does." Scalia, in other words, believes it is emphatically not his duty to make law but to interpret it. Would that all judges believed the same.

RLC

Empty Shells

One of my students has responded to our post about the second grader suspended for drawing a water pistol with this anecdote:

At my high school a classmate of mine was suspended for two weeks and expulsion was pending an administrative hearing for having spent shotgun shells in the bed of his pick up truck. He was not expelled but did have to wait for the hearing to determine that. What sense did that make? Spent shot gun shells can't hurt anyone. There was no gun and the only crime he was guilty of was not being neat enough to clean out his truck before going to school.

Perhaps there was more to this than what the student who relates it was aware, perhaps not. But if not, it's hard to think of words to express the utter mindlessness of the school officials who suspended this boy. It is as if their job requires them to be little more than unthinking machines or zombies who have no ability to actually reason their way through particular cases. A zero tolerance policy regarding firearms means to them that anyone who brings to school anything at all associated with a weapon faces suspension.

A spent shotgun shell, though, is no more a threat to someone than is a photograph of a gun in a magazine. I wonder if the school library has purged from its shelves every copy of Outdoor Life or other magazines likely to carry ads for guns. I wonder if students are allowed to wear membership patches for the NRA or Izaak Walton League on their clothing. I wonder if the boy had had a hammer or baseball bat in his truck, far deadlier implements than an empty shotgun shell, whether he would have faced a two week suspension.

These questions, however, would only occur to rational individuals to ask, and that appears to be a cohort in which school administrators are becoming increasingly uncommon.

RLC

The New Fascism

This week has been designated by a coalition of organizations as Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. It's a week given to the discussion on campuses of the nature and threat of Islamic radicalism. Speakers at over a hundred colleges have been addressing the problems before audiences of students, faculty and interested community members. Many of those audiences have been hostile and some of them have been appallingly so.

Consider, for example, what happened at Emory University, where the concept of the free exchange of ideas is evidently anathema to the neo-fascists of the left. At Emory, students and others took it upon themselves to deny listeners the opportunity to learn about global jihad by noisily and rudely disrupting the event until the speaker, David Horowitz, himself a former left-wing radical, finally had to give up.

As this report on the incident explains, this is precisely the tactic used by the Nazi brownshirts in the Germany of the 1930s, and it has, or should have, no place in America. Unfortunately, there's very little of traditional America which remains on some of our university campuses.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the report:

Throughout the lecture, many protesters were waving their signs, and yelling "Does George Bush respect anybody's rights?" and "Are we going to talk about who killed JFK?" The colorful expressions shouted by protesters included the generic, "Racist, sexist, anti-gay. David Horowitz, go away!" and "stop the war for oil," as well as more creative "why don't we talk about fascism in America?" and "no more torture in our name." When Horowitz warned the audience of the threat of a nuclear attack, someone yelled, "Be afraid, be very afraid," nearly bursting out into an impromptu dance. The audience used a lot of rancorous laughter to disrupt the speech.

As soon as Horowitz commented on radical Islam waging war against the West, someone predictably yelled, "do you think it has anything to do with Israel's treatment of Palestine?" When Horowitz talked about Christians burning Jews at the stake during the crusades and Jews finding Muslims to be more hospitable, someone shouted "That's exactly what Ann Coulter is calling for now." When Horowitz mentioned that Jews and Christians are now treated as second class citizens in much of the Muslim world, a loud applause shot up from the audience. When Horowitz tried to bring up the treatment of women and issues such as female genital mutilation (FGM), the audience chanted, "That's not Islam."

Although the actions of campus leftists culminated during David Horowitz's lecture, in reality what transpired is indicative of what has become a toxic environment on today's university campuses. Conservative viewpoints are repeatedly stifled and censored, and often those who dare to question the left-wing orthodoxy are treated as second-class citizens on campus. Emory University is no exception, and has once again demonstrated the campus community's utter intolerance and inability to engage in civil debate.

For Horowitz's thoughts on the evening's proceedings go here.

When your ideas are intellectually bankrupt it would be counterproductive to engage your opponent in debate. All you can do is shout him down. When you hate your country as much as these people do, any enemy of your country becomes your friend, even terrorists. It's pretty sick.

RLC

Cosmic Coincidence

Newsweek's science writer Sharon Begley talks about the phenomenon of cosmic "dark energy" which is thought to be responsible for the fact that the expansion of the universe is actually speeding up rather than slowing down. This dark energy is believed to result from sub-atomic particles popping into existence of the vaccum of space, but there's a problem. The energy that would be produced by this process is calculated to be 10 to the 55th power greater than the dark energy of the universe. Something must be cancelling out the surplus and doing so with an astonishing level of percision. Were there just a little more dark energy the universe would rip apart. As Begley puts it:

[S]omething else cancels out all but a smidgen of the energy from the popping particles. That something else is anyone's guess. Worse, the precision of the required cancellation-erase the ink on every magazine ever printed except for exactly one comma, here-strains credulity.

Indeed it does, and add to this incredible fine-tuning the fact that dozens of other cosmic parameters are similarly precise and it just boggles the mind. For example, it has been calculated by Roger Penrose that the initial entropy of the universe had to be exact to one part in ten to the 10 to the 123rd power or else a universe suitable for life would not have formed.

This sort of unimaginable number is an embarrassment to the materialist who is compelled by his metaphysical beliefs to argue that such incredible calibrations are merely a fortuitous accident. Many materialists, however, are so uncomfortable with this line of thinking that they've retreated to the refuge of the "many worlds" hypothesis. This theory, for which there is absolutely no empirical evidence, states that there are as many as 10 to the 500th power universes of all different types. With so many possibilities, the argument goes, there has to be at least one suitable for life and we're it. In other words, by raising the number of worlds we can lower the improbability of the existence of a world as finely calibrated as this one is.

Begley writes:

...unless "the" universe is actually only one of many universes. Cosmologists are seriously entertaining that possibility. In the big bang that started our universe, little bits of space might have pinched off, said physicist Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas. Each pocket universe could have different features. In one-ours-the improbable cancellation of most of the cosmological constant would have occurred, leaving just enough to explain the dark energy.

The irony of the many worlds hypothesis is that it's not a scientific idea because there's no way to test it, and neither is there any evidence for it. It's an ad hoc metaphysical theory developed to lower the astronomically high improbability that our universe exists purely by chance. Since it's a philosophical hypothesis it is on the same plane as its only real rival, the concept of cosmic design. This is bad news for the materialist, to be sure, since there is a way to test competing metaphysical claims - Occam's razor, i.e. the principle that the simplest explanation that fits all the facts is the best.

In the present case the simplest explanation is that there's just a single universe which has the parameters and laws that it does because it has been intentionally designed to support life. The alternative, that there are a near infinite number of undetectable universes which exhibit the entire range of possible values for their physical parameters, is refuted by its own extravagance. If it weren't that this theory is the only way scientists and philosophers could rescue their materialism, no one would be caught dead endorsing it.

In order to avoid the conclusion that the universe is intentionally designed materialists have to resort to a highly speculative and ad hoc theory that makes a shambles of the principle of simplicity. Not only that, but it doesn't really help anyway because it raises more difficult questions: If there are all these universes what is producing them and why should we expect they would have different parameters than our universe? Why not expect that they be identical to ours? And what's generating these different universes and their parameters and laws in the first place?

Perhaps Ms Begley will write about those questions in a future column.

RLC

Re: Taking a Bite Outa' Crime

A student of mine responds on our Feedback page to our post titled Taking a Bite Outa' Crime. He shares some interesting thoughts. Check it out. RLC

A <i>Water Pistol</i>?

Just as a psychopath has no conscience, some people seem to be born with utterly no common sense. Consider, for example, the school administrators in this report:

A New Jersey second-grader's drawing of a stick figure shooting a gun has earned him a one-day school suspension.

Seven-year-old Kyle Walker's mom told an The Press newspaper of Atlantic City that her son was suspended for violating the district's zero-tolerance policy on guns. She said her son told her he'd drawn a water pistol.

Kyle gave the picture to another child on the school bus, and that child's parents complained about it to school officials.

The case is not the first in New Jersey in which students were suspended for depictions of weapons.

Four kindergarten boys were suspended in 2000 for playing cops and robbers, even though they were using their fingers as guns.

It's no wonder boys are becoming increasingly disaffected and alienated from our schools. The people that run them have no idea what a boy is and are trying to turn them into something they're not. Either we start weeding out the administrators who make school a form of earthly purgatory for these kids or we start segregating schools by sex and staffing boys' schools with men who were themselves once boys and who understand that you don't suspend a boy from school for drawing a picture of a water gun.

I wonder if Kyle would have been suspended if he'd drawn a picture of two men engaging in lewd conduct. I doubt it. They probably would have put him on the honor roll. No wonder people home school their kids.

HT: Hot Air

Devolution

A friend passes this along to me, and I thought it interesting enough to post:

About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government."

"A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury."

"From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years"

During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:

1. From bondage to spiritual faith;
   
2. From spiritual faith to great courage;
   
3. From courage to liberty;
   
4. From liberty to abundance;
   
5. From abundance to complacency;
   
6. From complacency to apathy;
   
7. From apathy to dependence;
   
8. From dependence back into bondage"
   

Where do you think our society falls in this progression? I'd put us somewhere between 5 and 7, but maybe I'm being unduly pessimisstic. I hope.

RLC

The Kurds

Michael Totten has an excellent article on the Iraqi Kurds in Azure.

There's much to learn from reading it and you won't find this kind of information many other places. Here are just a couple of excerpts:

Ethnic Kurds make up around 20 percent of Iraq's population. They, along with Persians, are indigenous to the upper Middle East, having lived there long before Arabs invaded from the south and Turks from the east....The majority live in the northern mountains, high above the dusty plains of Mesopotamia, in the officially recognized and constitutionally sanctioned Kurdish Autonomous Region. There, the war is already over. In fact, the war was hardly fought there at all.

Erbil, the largest city in Kurdistan, has suffered three terrorist attacks since coalition forces terminated the Baath regime in 2003. The second-largest city, Suleimaniah, was struck only once. The third-largest city, Dohuk, has never been hit at all. More people have been wounded or killed by terrorists in Spain than in Iraqi Kurdistan since 2003. No one has been kidnapped.

Indeed, it is hard to overstate how pro-American the people of Kurdistan are. They are possibly more pro-American than Americans themselves. If Bill Clinton was America's first "black" president, people in at least one part of the world say Bush is the first "Muslim" one: He is sometimes referred to in Kurdistan as "Hajji Bush" (meaning that he made the Muslim pilgrimage, or Hajj, to Mecca), an undeniably high honor for a Republican Christian from Texas. No, Kurdistan is not a "red state," and Kurds are not Republicans. Nor does it occur to most of them to prefer America's conservatives over its liberals. Rather, their warm feelings of gratitude and friendship extend to all Americans and both political parties for having liberated them from the totalitarian dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

So Saddam launched the genocidal Anfal Campaign in 1986 to ethnically cleanse the Kurds from his country. "They wanted to remove all the Kurds from everywhere in Iraq," Rostam said. "They just destroyed whole villages and provinces and moved people into collective towns and concentration camps. Some of the Turkmen villages around here were demolished for the same reason. The point was to make it an Arab area, and no other."

Iraq's Kurdish cities were devastated by air strikes, artillery, and chemical weapons. Forests were clear-cut. Concrete was poured into wells. Between 100,000 and 200,000 people were murdered in massacres, and 85 percent of Kurdish villages were destroyed. Tens of thousands, including children, were tortured to death in prison blocks.

"We believe if the Americans withdraw from this country there will be many more problems," Colonel Mudhafer said. "The Sunni and Shia want total control of Iraq. We are going to get involved in that. Iran is going to be involved in that. Turkey is going to be involved in that. Syria is going to be involved in that. The Sunni and Shia fighting in Baghdad will pull us in. We are going to be involved. Turkey and Iran will make problems for us. It is not going to be safe. All the American martyrs will have died for nothing, and there will be more problems in the future. Americans should build big bases here." For obvious reasons, the idea of the American military garrisoning its forces in Kurdistan is wildly popular among the Kurds.

Those who work with the United States in the Iraqi government, the Iraqi army, and the Iraqi police are already on the hit lists of numerous death squads, terrorist cells, and militias. Doctors, lawyers, writers, journalists, and countless others have already been singled out for extermination for choosing democracy and civil society over politics by bullets and car bombs. The terror that plagued Pol Pot's Cambodia in the 1970s and Algeria in the 1990s now stalks every decent person in the center and south of Iraq.

There's much more information on the Kurdish people and their role in Iraq at the link.

RLC

The Myth of the Naked Public Square

There is a myth that has circulated throughout our culture for over a generation now to the effect that we must be vigilant to keep our public-policy debates free of all religious assumptions. Religion, we've been told over and over, has no place in our public conversation. It's all about the separation of Church and state, don't you know.

This myth does great harm to our civic life because it essentially undercuts the possibility that any position one takes on an issue will be grounded in anything more substantial than personal taste. Consider a controversial social issue like capital punishment and imagine two people, Joe and Carl, debating it. Joe says he's opposed to capital punishment, and Carl asks why. What does Joe say?

He may respond by insisting that it's wrong to kill people, but, if so, Carl can simply ask him why killing people is wrong. Ultimately, Joe is going to have to rest his opposition to capital punishment on something other than his own subjective preferences, but the only solid ground he could rest it on is a conviction that God forbids killing. In the naked public square, however, that option is forbidden. The most that anyone can give as a reason for their position on capital punishment, or any of the issues we debate, is that "I don't (or do) like it," but that's hardly a compelling reason why anyone else should agree.

In other words, in a public forum which has been scrubbed clean of all religious references all debate comes down to a dispute over personal tastes and feelings, and in such a debate no one has any more moral authority or insight than anyone else. There's no possibility of appeal to transcendent objective values which could help inform our decision-making.

Indeed, the only way to prevail in public disputes is by amassing on one's side enough people who share one's feelings that one has the political clout to impose them by law on those who don't. In a world in which God has been banished from political discourse we don't win debates by persuasion, we win them by coercion. The person who can shout the loudest or who can gather the biggest mob is the victor.

Genuine public debates can only be carried out among people who share a common value system. If everyone agrees that God disdains killing then we can debate whether there may be reasonable exceptions to that principle. But if we expel God from our civic and social life we have no basis even for thinking that killing of any sort is wrong and, that being so, there's no place to stand if we wish to argue that capital punishment, or torture, or abortion, or gay marriage, or anything else, is wrong.

The irony of this is that the only people who can engage each other in the public square, the only voices anyone should bother to heed, are those of people who share a common belief in God. The atheist is really irrelevant because all he's doing when he says that X is wrong is telling us that he doesn't like X, and that may be an interesting biographical tidbit but it's nothing to build a policy upon.

RLC

Another Myth Laid to Rest

Darwinians have for a generation or so regaled us with the statistic that we share 99% of our genes in common with chimpanzees and that this is strong evidence that both species have evolved from a common ancestor and are closely related.

Now it's turning out that the 1% difference is incorrect. Not only that, but researchers have discovered that most humans differ genetically from each other by about that same amount. In other words, even were the 1% figure true (It appears that the correct difference is closer to 6.5%) we would have to conclude that humans were as genetically different from each other as they are believed to be from chimps, and that therefore chimps would be as closely related to us as are our fellow humans.

This is nonsense, of course, and most scientists are quietly putting the human/chimp myth to rest in the same graveyard as the myth of the vestigial appendix has been recently interred.

RLC

A Little More Honesty, Please

ProteinWisdom offers some examples of how the left is framing President Bush's SCHIP veto:

"I disagreed with the president's position because he wants to leave out all the children." Dennis Kucinich, Democrat Presidential candidate

"We're holding these members of Congress accountable for standing with President Bush and against our children." Noah Winer, head of MoveOn.org's health care campaign.

"You don't have money to fund the war or children. But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president's amusement." Congressman Pete Stark

"Why does President Bush hate American kids?" Keith Olbermann host of MSNBC's Countdown

As each of these men knows, the President actually wants to increase, not cut, the number of children covered by the program, but he wants to keep the focus of coverage on children in the lowest rungs of the middle class. The Democrats want taxpayers to pick up the coverage of millions of children who are already covered by private insurance. The President wants to expand SCHIP by 5 billion dollars, the Democrats by 35 billion.

Over this disagreement his opponents are willing to say the kinds of things that are quoted above.

It really is sad that the public debate can't be conducted with more integrity than this.

RLC